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Prime Minister Stephen Harper wants to fight the coming election on security. Just the other day, he announced another $150 million for the RCMP’s anti-terror budget at a pre-campaign stop in Quebec.

He should be careful. Clean air and water, productive soils and resilient natural ecosystems make possible the society, health and wealth we seek to protect: they constitute our natural security.

And Canada’s natural security defence is MIA.

I was forced to that conclusion as I tried over many months to answer an apparently simple query: “How well has Canada defended our environment over the past quarter-century – really?” The question was asked by the Vancouver-based Tyee Solutions Society, and the research required to answer it paid for by a private foundation on the understanding that it would be conducted in a strictly bi-partisan manner.

Which was just as well, because no party emerged without stain.

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Canadian governments of every political stripe – including the present one – have enacted impressive laws for the defence of our natural security. We have laws that purport to protect clean air and water. We have laws to defend species under threat of extinction, and others to stand up for birds that visit us only seasonally. We have laws to prevent new development from damaging the environment, and even laws to protect entire ecosystems and habitat types.

In 2012, the federal Environment Commissioner found that the government of Canada had no idea whether any of those laws was actually reducing environmental damage. No systems existed to determine their effectiveness.

Nonetheless, the same Parliamentary officer and others have warned us repeatedly that our natural security is degrading. Species and ecosystems are in retreat from the Arctic to the Great Lakes, the Atlantic to Pacific. Most of the species that were endangered when Canada passed an act for their protection in 2002 are even more at risk now than they were then. The federal departments designated to protect them admit openly they have no idea how fast some – for example, forest birds – are vanishing.

Dereliction in the defence of natural security is not new for Canada’s government. I examined legislation, actions, events and audits over a quarter of a century. Enough time for a generation to be conceived, survive adolescence and reach voting age. A period in which five different prime ministers from three parties ran the country.

At the start of that time, in 1989, Canada was a leader in global climate discussions. But in 1993—the last year of the Progressive Conservative mandate – the Auditor-General pointed out that Canada had no “federal framework of desirable water quality objectives for the major ecosystems across Canada.” We still don’t.

Reporting a decade later in 2003, the Environment Commissioner found the by-then Liberal government’s progress toward reviewing the safety of thousands of chemical products brought to market before modern testing, “slow.” He warned that it was “likely that some of them do not meet today’s standards.” A dozen years later, the work is still unfinished, with no completion date in this decade either.

In this decade, blue-green algae toxic to neural and liver systems are spreading in Canada’s lakes and even oceans. Endocrine system defects and cancers are on the rise, while scores of semi-metabolized pharmaceuticals linked to endocrine disruption – from anti-depressants to byproducts of cocaine – are found in every major southern river from the St. Lawrence to the Saskatchewan to the Fraser. In 2014, the Conservative Party of Canada government withdrew federal protection from several thousand of those waterways.

If our governments’ neglect of Canada’s natural defence has only deepened over the past quarter-century, the values at stake have been clarified. The most expensive disasters in the history of Toronto and Calgary – ice-storms and floods – have occurred in this decade, and represent failures of natural security. The flip side – the dollar benefit we receive from strong ecosystems – has also been tallied with greater precision: $2.7 billion a year from Ontario’s greenbelt, for example.

So far, the pre-campaign campaigning for this autumn’s federal election has focused on middle-class prosperity and police powers. It’s worth remembering that no number of pre-emptive terror arrests or tax breaks can protect our health and prosperity if we fail to defend our natural security.

Chris Wood is an author, journalist and coordinating editor of the Tyee Solutions Society.

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